Jim Clark's History Of The World

BRIEFING - Nation & world

June 3, 1997|By Jim Clark of The Sentinel Staff

ON THIS DATE in 208 B.C. the first tattoo was recorded. . . . In 1808 Confederate President Jefferson Davis was born in Kentucky. Davis and President Lincoln were born in the same year and in the same state. Lincoln's family moved north and Davis' family moved south.

In 1844 Garret A. Hobart was born in Long Branch, N.J. He became vice president in 1897 but died in office in 1899. He was replaced on the Republican ticket in 1900 by Teddy Roosevelt, who became president in 1901 when President William McKinley was assassinated. Had Hobart lived, he probably would have become president.

In 1864 Union troops commanded by Gen. Ulysses S. Grant suffered one of the bloodiest days of the Civil War at the Battle of Cold Harbor in Virginia. Grant's troops attacked Gen. Robert E. Lee's well-entrenched army and suffered tremendous casualties. A second attack failed, and Grant was unable to mount a third attack. Grant refused to ask for a truce to remove his wounded soldiers from the battlefield and thousands of men died.

In 1888 the poem ''Casey at the Bat'' was first published in the San Francisco Examiner. . . . In 1924 Austrian writer Franz Kafka, 40, died of tuberculosis. He once said, ''In a fight between you and the world, bet on the world.''

In 1937 the Duke of Windsor married American divorcee Wallis Warfield Simpson in France. He had given up his crown to marry her.

In 1942 the Japanese attempted to take Midway Island in the Pacific but were met by the U.S. fleet and suffered a major setback. It was the turning point for the United States and marked the beginning of the end for the Japanese.

In 1946 Louis Reard, a former engineer, unveiled the bikini bathing suit. He named it for Bikini Atoll, where nuclear tests were

being held. Reard said he thought his two-piece suits would be ''highly explosive.''

In 1949 Wesley Brown became the first black American to graduate from the U.S. Naval Academy.

In 1965 Maj. Edward White became the first U.S. astronaut to walk in space. . . . In 1972 Sally Priesand, 25, became the first female rabbi in the United States and only the second in Judaic history.